Playing Harmony of Dissonance. not as smooth as Aria but better than most metroid games. I miss the modern ability to notate the map yourself 
6 Likes
Finished Guardians of The Galaxy. Bad Game but the characters, dialog, and art really carry it. Was seriously impressed how it is a bunch of messy idiots dealing with trauma and loss. Like after so many games I played that are so safe about “relationships” and completely adverse to interpersonal conflict this is the thing that has teeth and heart?
I loved messing with the raccoon at every given opportunity. Mantis in this is really fantastic. Everyone is. They did such a good job that it drops being a joke when Groot goes “I am Groot” and you understand what he means to say. That’s impressive.
And the second game from this studio that is explicitly about moving on from a loved one’s death. This one didn’t make me cry but it got close.
It also helped me understand I will never understand people from the NE coast and their need to antagonize the ones they like/love.
6 Likes
And tonight was Golden Sun and if this doesn’t take an incredible nose dive in quality after the intro it is way more playable than I was expected. More complicated too. It has “But Thou Must” but in the terms of The Adult Is Talking and Peer Pressure so you get deeper and deeper into a bad situation despite how you try to prevent it.
It’s still like, a basic JRPG story of your child hood (girl) friend is kidnapped by the (not) bad guys (and her (not) dead brother) and you gotta go to 4 elemental dungeons.
Surprised it straight up says it is too late to save the world you are only trying to mitigate damage. Anyways surprised. And it is nice to see Climax Entertainment yes/no .
7 Likes
I finally picked Nocturne back up and grinded out a few more levels/fused a few demons to try to overcome the hurdle I’ve hit. Took me about two hours fighting against pretty weak enemies, but it did involve at least one journey into an area that I was maybe a little ill-prepared for and I ran into a lot of baddies that have instakill abilities. Luckily for the survivability of my Switch I didn’t get taken out.
This game does have style for days, I will give it that. Demon fusing in particular hasn’t stopped being fun.
2 Likes
are u stuck on matador 
i think lvl 18 is good for him bc you can fuse uzume at that level but more is probably excessive. you can beat him earlier of course but that might be the “intended” strat
1 Like
I do wish that I could put up with extremely boring videogames and media to see the character writing buried underneath like you’re talking about. I believe there’s quality but games, or maybe just triple-A scale games, are just the worst medium for writers to do this kind of work.
4 Likes
Yeah this is exactly what happened he whooped my ass and I looked up the pro strats so I leveled up to 18 and fused an Uzume and one or two other demons to try to bulk up my squad. Plus I got that Magatama that nullifies force. I’m probably just about ready to give it another go.
2 Likes
Matador fight is designed to teach you how much the battle system is biased towards making enemies eat turns by nullifying elemental attacks – it’s basically unwinnable at a realistically low level otherwise and relatively easy once you do that
4 Likes
It’s been awhile since I played Nocturne but FWIW I remember Matador being the hardest fight in my playthrough of the game by a pretty significant margin. I found the rest of the game pretty easy after that.
5 Likes
Tried Annalynn ( Annalynn by Cruise Elroy , also on Steam) but bounced off it as soon as my retro-cute character’s overanimated head bounced off the platform above them instead of allowing them to jump through. Cute snakes spawned from the floor or fell from the ceiling right on me constantly, all in the first, two-screen-wide stage. I like the Pac-Man + Donkey Kong set-up, the embedded 960p vertical screen, and the low-res graphics, but author Cruise Elroy seems to favor restrictive, no-warning, insta-kill play, which is definitely not my thing.
Sample screens here:
fwiw it’s totally possible to do matador at level 15, even on hard. all you really need is hifumi and sources of media, sukukaja (you can get an aquans from rag’s that has it) and rakukaja (you can fuse it up onto something from a recruited hua po if you raise it to level 9 first). if you have mc use healing items and eat turns with hifumi, focus on max buffing and staying as close to full health as possible and use phys attacks once you’re there (tarukaja and dark might are great if you have them) then it should be fine. ime you can also usually sukunda him down -1 without him dekundaing and that doesn’t hurt. you can even get away with having a few force-weak demons if they can reliably survive at the beginning since mc will cut his turns short anyway.
4 Likes
Been playing a lot of Nintendo Switch shit as I travel on the train and do tourist stuff.
- Finished Bowser’s Fury. It’s so good. I have come lately to the world of Mario games and haven’t played many of them, so this is now, like, my second favorite Mario after Odyssey. Great shit. Cannot believe they made a somewhat systemic open world Mario game and nobody TOLD me… very glad I finally checked it out!
- Played some Super Mario 3D World, which is part of the same application as Bowser’s Fury… it’s fine! Not really my kind of thing but undeniably fun and polished.
- Finished Brilliant Diamond’s main plot. Trying to finish all my Pokemon games in advance of Scarlet and Violet. My living dex is missing only Diancie and Marshadow at this point. If you have extras of either and want to give them to me, let me know! I can trade!! Otherwise I am going to hack one in. I have gotten Pokemon almost every single way it is possible to get a Pokemon, and the only experience I haven’t had yet is hacking. I need to do it at SOME point in order to have the comprehensive experience, but I’m unsure these are the best two to try it with. They’re event distribution Pokemon, and I am irrationally scared I won’t make them legit enough even with the help of a bot. I have, like, an 8-10 page writeup already of my living dex adventures/pokemon trading economy experiences, so I’m very excited to try and finish this project up and get something written out into the world before the next game on the Pokemon treadmill flattens me for a few months.
13 Likes
Pac-Man Arrangement Arcade Ver.
in Pac-Man Museum+ (PS4)
Sometimes too much incredibly intricate pixel art going on. Cornering may be a bit wibbly. New ghost Kinky merges with the others to form terrifying, double-size combos with deadly pair-specific powers. Hallucinogenic pills. Got to a maze with really confusing stairways. Feels insane at times. Some really good music. Incredibly 2D. So glad I got to play this. (Oh shoot apparently Namco Museum - Wikipedia this was in the 2001 Namco Museum for PS2, Xbox, and GC; I wasn’t paying attention and stuck with my 2000 DC version instead. ;_; )
7 Likes
I’ve been slowly working through Mother to finish my reverse completion run of the series. My first experience with the series was playing Mother 3 almost 5(?) years ago and then I played through EarthBound for the first time ever earlier this year.
Once I finish Mother I’ll try to put my thoughts together on what it was like to play through it backwards and how the games compare to each other from that perspective. For right now all I can say is good freaking god there are so many encounters!!! To what end???
My two backburner games at the moment that I’ve stalled out on and I plan to pick back up sometime soon are Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (I haven’t played it since the last time I got mad at it) and FFVIII.
I’m still not really sure how I feel about FFVIII, I stalled out on it because a lot of it feels like a chore and I’m hitting a wall with the combat system. I’m not asking for any advice at the moment regarding the combat system and junctioning but I might ask in the future. I’m annoyed at how fiddly it seems to be and the story isn’t keeping me interested enough to power through figuring out what I’m doing wrong.
9 Likes
new monkey island reminded me i never played the 2nd monkey island for some reason. i’m at the last act now… it’s good, the three-island interlocking puzzle section is great even if some of the individual ones are sorta bogus (spit contest!), but i feel most impressed by all the stuff which exists to offset that adventure game feeling of a sterile inventory puzzle hell. superfluous systems like the coins or the whole reference library, things that seem at first like they’ll be puzzles but turn out not to be, like the pneumatic food delivery system and getting past the item-sniffing dog… a back and forth between having obvious solutions caveated into puzzles vs having them Just Work and a return to the classic “solving a puzzle just by whining enough at someone”
the pixel art is beautiful and dense, it actually kind of reminded me of the first tomb raider at points: that sense of initially feeling lost in this wall of visual noise and texture which you then learn to read and navigate around. it’s funny how that aspect slowly went away once both series had higher res to play with… you can switch back and forth in MI2 between original and remastered graphics at any time ingame and it sorta functioned for me like a hint system, a way of making sure i was correctly reading the details of a room and not missing anything. and that back and forth really highlighted how the noise and murk of pixel art helped to offset the potential sterility of all those puzzle chambers.
still cautiously excited for #5 after enjoying thimbleweed park a lot…
19 Likes
i was worried when edf 5 started with a long, slow, boring tutorial stage, but luckily, after the first couple of stages it starts being a proper edf game.
why would you feel the need to include a tutorial in the fifth entry of probably the simplest modern shooting game series? especially an unskippable one.
7 Likes
beat Martyr Logarius, the most intentful fight so far. really enjoyed the vigorous feedback (too many hits in a row! dodged wrong direction! bad situational awareness! you idiot, parry!) and acknowledging & internalising it successfully.
I would go onto the Nightmare Frontier and continue avoiding the Shadows of Yharnam, but… I saw Alfred’s hat and I must have it.
my internet broke so I’m missing all the notes and help from guides and… it’s fine? good?
9 Likes
No way, they tried to warn us!
5 Likes
this is how i read this for some reason
3 Likes
ok, edf 5 is completely redeemed by the appearance of the giant frog-men. the stage where there’s a bunch of them skulking around the europeancity map and you’ve got to jetpack guerilla warfare them all is a ton of fun
11 Likes